Daily Excerpt: Divorced! Survival Techniques for Singles over Forty - Feeling Abandoned (Romer)
from Divorced! Survival Techniques for Singles over Forty (Romer)
Feeling Abandoned
There
you are, facing your first Christmas alone—ever. You’ve always had someone
around at the holidays—first your parents and siblings, later on your spouse
and your own children—but this year, things are different. Your wife left you
in August and you haven’t really had the heart to hook up with anyone else yet.
Both your parents are long gone and your only sister lives 3,000 miles away,
with her own family to take care of.
What
should you do? There’s a big part of you right now that feels like a motherless
child, totally abandoned. Maybe you feel rejected, unattractive, or unworthy of
love. These are all feelings that society places on people who are the
“victims” of divorce, and they have nothing to do with who you really are. This
is not a place where you want to remain for very long. Once you erase the
perception of yourself as being abandoned by your ex-spouse, a lot of these
painful feelings will disappear of their own accord.
In
my own case, I felt like a holocaust had hit me during the holidays after my
husband Ray and I separated. During Christmas of ’84, I celebrated with Ray,
his parents, my parents, my brother, and Ray’s brother and his wife and child.
Ten people, including me. Then in 1985 my father died, making one less at the
table. In 1987 my mother died—we were down to eight. Then in 1988 Ray left, so
Christmas that year was down to two—my brother Robert and me. And yes, Robert
lived 3,000 miles away, but I was so grateful to have him in my life.
In
1989 I got back together with my first husband Jack. (We’d divorced after nine
years of marriage.) We married again in 1994, proving that you can go home
again—even with someone you’ve previously divorced.
*************************************
“You
need to get a job,” my therapist told me after Ray left. “I know you haven’t
worked in eight years, but it will change the way you look at yourself. You’re
not helpless. You’re not a victim. You’re simply starting over.”
The
therapist was right. Rattling around an empty house, no matter how nicely
furnished, while trying to analyze what I did wrong, was doing nothing for my
self-esteem. Regardless of one’s financial situation, I suggest work as the number
one antidote for divorce, after God. As soon as we can change our identity from,
“I’ve been abandoned,” to, “I’m starting over,” we will feel a whole lot
better. After a couple of months interviewing, I managed to secure a job as a
grant writer for The Queens Museum. It was not easy going back to work after
eight years, and the job itself was intense and difficult, but all the time
spent stressing about my new job was time taken away from fretting about my
divorce. It was a win-win situation.
Speaking
of God, one of my biggest blessings in the early stages of my divorce was being
introduced to a new church by my friend Beth. “With God, you are never alone,”
Beth told me, and she was right. I’d been brought up in a non-denominational
church and hadn’t really been involved since my teenage years, although I’d
always considered myself a spiritual person. Now I began to realize that God was,
indeed, “a very present help” in times of trouble.
I
remember one afternoon I had to drive out to the house I’d shared with Ray on
the North Shore of Long Island and pack up a whole lot of furniture stored in
the basement. It was my furniture and the movers were coming the next day—there
was no way around it, but I dreaded the task; it was November and skies were
bleak. I was afraid I’d spend the afternoon in tears as I worked.
But
that didn’t happen. On the way out of the city I began to repeat to myself,
over and over, “God is love.” As I drove over the Triborough Bridge and onto
the Long Island Expressway, the meaning of this sentence began to permeate my
consciousness. God is love! Love, the most wonderful feeling in the world and
what I thought I’d been deprived of with my divorce. But if God was love, there
was no way I could be deprived, because God was omnipresent, encompassing
everything and every place—even the basement of my house in Brookville, Long
Island.
By
the time I reached Brookville, about an hour out of town, my heart was soaring.
Wrapped in love, I entered the house, went down to the basement and completed
my task in a relatively short time. I shed no tears, because there was nothing
to cry about.
God
had shown me I could still have love, with or without a husband. It was the
first of many “healings” I was to experience after my divorce.
We
are never separated from God, and because of this, we can never be abandoned.
God is always there to “mother” us in the way we need most.
For more books by Joanna Romer, click HERE.
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